Tag: Blinded By The Right

11/15/2014   The New York Times   By AMY CHOZICK

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Hillary Rodham Clinton’s in-between phase started here on Saturday, at a carefully staged appearance with her daughter and surrounded by old friends.

In her first public event since the midterm elections, and before she announces whether she will run for president in 2016, Mrs. Clinton joined Chelsea Clinton at the William J. Clinton Presidential Center to discuss the advancement of women and girls and to take questions from an audience of friends and local activists.

“The fact that we have a granddaughter means that we are even more focused on these issues and thinking about what the world she will grow up in will be like for young girls,” Mrs. Clinton said in one of many references to Chelsea’s new baby, Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky. Her joint question-and-answer session was part of a weekend-long celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Clinton Center.

After the event, Mrs. Clinton said, “You have to look at the past, you have to see what we’ve done and why we did it and we learned from it in order to think about what you can do for the next ten years.”

The event provided a warm Arkansas embrace for Mrs. Clinton as she waded back into charitable work after weeks of intense campaigning for Democrats, many of whom lost their midterm races.

Before she and Chelsea took the stage, the former first couple strolled through the lobby of the sunlit museum, embracing Arkansas friends and White House aides who had flown in for the weekend’s festivities.

As those around Mrs. Clinton begin to angle for positions on a potential campaign, she has wound down her public schedule to a handful of awards galas and events related to her charitable work at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

On Friday, Bill Clinton had closed a day’s worth of panel policy discussions about his administration to deliver a passionate defense of his legacy. But on Saturday, it was Mrs. Clinton’s turn, and she focused on her early work with single mothers and children as first lady of Arkansas.

Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Clinton asked some local advocates and business leaders to join them on the stage to talk about their relationship with the Clintons and how their work to help women and girls overlaps.

“I started a lot of these programs and the point was to show that, as Chelsea rightly said, these can work and you can’t get discouraged,” Mrs. Clinton said after the event.

A version of this article appears in print on November 16, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: The Clintons Look to Past, for Now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/us/politics/the-clintons-look-to-the-past-for-now.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

10/24/2014   The New York Times   By AMY CHOZICK

President Obama heads into midterm elections in which he may face crushing losses. He has been spurned by his own party, whose candidates do not even want to be seen with him. The president’s supporters say the toxic atmosphere in Washington has made it impossible for Mr. Obama to succeed.

But there is a counter view being offered by a former Democratic president that as far as personal attacks go, he, Bill Clinton, had it worse. “Nobody’s accused him of murder yet, as far as I know. I mean, it was pretty rough back then,” Mr. Clinton said last month in an interview aired by PBS, when asked about the partisan climate facing Mr. Obama.

Whatever Mr. Clinton’s motivations, his comments, which his former aides frequently refer to when the topic comes up, do not permit Mr. Obama to excuse his legislative setbacks by simply citing hyper-partisanship. As one former White House aide to Mr. Clinton put it: “They impeached our guy.”

The tumult of the Clinton years — including conspiracy theories about the death of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a deputy White House counsel and friend of the Clintons’ from Arkansas who committed suicide in 1993, the investigation into Whitewater, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment — has come back as Hillary Rodham Clinton inches toward a run for president in 2016.

When asked last month what the single biggest misconception about his presidency was, Mr. Clinton told Charlie Rose on PBS, “I think that most people underappreciate the level of extreme partisanship that took hold in ’94.”

Twenty years later, Mr. Clinton has devoted much of his energy to campaigning for Democrats who do not want to be associated with Mr. Obama. At frequent campaign stops across the country, the former president does not specifically talk about who had it worse, but instead emphasizes that polarization and an inability to work together are the cause of the country’s problems.

“Every place in the world people take the time to work together, good things are happening,” Mr. Clinton said this week at a campaign stop in Hazard, Ky., for the Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes. “Every place in the world where people spend all their time fighting each other and telling everybody how sorry they are, bad things happen.”

If Mr. Clinton does not spell out on the campaign trail how bad things were for him, his Democratic supporters do.

“Everyone looks at Clinton in this hazy glow of, ‘He’s so wonderful,’ ” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist. “But when he was president, boy, were there a lot of people who went after him in a very personal, some would say dirty, way.”

Even Mr. Clinton’s old rival, Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House, said people had a gauzy view of the Clinton years. “Everyone is doing the, ‘Gee, Newt and Bill got things done, why can’t Obama get anything done?’ routine,” Mr. Gingrich said. “Maybe it’s driving Bill nuts.”

The underlying implication is that Mr. Obama does not have it so rough. Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Clinton criticize the current president for being less able or willing than his Democratic predecessor to woo congressional Republicans.

VIDEO:

Bill Clinton Talks About Partisanship

Mr. Clinton talked to Charlie Rose of PBS about the level of partisanship during his presidency compared with what President Obama is facing now.

Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who served as Senate majority leader from 1996 to 2001, said Mr. Clinton was “affable” and “approachable,” even toward his political opponents.

“You could talk to him,” Mr. Lott said. “He was also willing to make a deal for the good of the country.” In contrast, he argued, Mr. Obama “has just walked away” — so if Mr. Clinton even tried to give the current president a pass, it “just won’t sell.”

Congressional Republicans, of course, have also refused to reach across the aisle and work with Mr. Obama the way they did in Mr. Lott’s era. The current Congress is on track to become one of the least legislatively productive in recent history. That is partly because Mr. Obama faces a far more polarized electorate than Mr. Clinton did.

Over the past 20 years, the number of Americans who hold extreme conservative or liberal views has doubled from 10 percent in 1994 to 21 percent in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. And the middle ground has shrunk, with 39 percent of Americans taking a roughly equal number of liberal and conservative positions, compared with 49 percent in 1994.

Mr. Clinton often talks about this polarization and says that while the partisan gridlock is worse today, and the American electorate is less willing to hear arguments they disagree with, the attacks he faced were more personal than those Mr. Obama has experienced.

In a 2012 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Clinton mentioned the “murder” conspiracy theory in the 1990s, and said of Mr. Obama’s tenure: “Nobody has tried to bankrupt him with bogus investigations, so it’s not quite as bad. But the political impasse has gone on longer.”

“I will certainly not contradict the president I worked for when he argues that it was even more personal then,” said William A. Galston, a former policy adviser to Mr. Clinton. “But the polarization of our official political institutions and our political parties has become even more acute than in the Clinton days,” he added.

That argument absolves Mr. Clinton of his own part in the scandals of the 1990s, several historians said. “They’re different situations because there were criminal allegations” against Mr. Clinton, said Ken Gormley, the author of “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr,” about the investigation led by Kenneth W. Starr.

“President Obama has attracted a lot of attacks when it’s hard to point to something exactly he has done that warranted them,” Mr. Gormley added.

Some of the venom directed at Mr. Obama has a racial component that Mr. Clinton, a relatable white Southerner, never had to deal with, said Douglas G. Brinkley, a presidential historian and professor at Rice University. “The Clintons created huge problems of their own making,” Mr. Brinkley added, while “Obama’s problem is that he bullheadedly pushed Obamacare, and he happens to be African-American.”

“You can’t get more personal than questioning a person’s veracity for where he was born,” said Mr. Galston, the former Clinton aide, referring to the “birther” conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate.

Mr. Clinton’s reminders about how bitter things were in Washington when he was in the White House might not be the best message as Mrs. Clinton eyes an attempt at getting back there, as president herself this time.

Senator Rand Paul, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, has already seized on the Lewinsky scandal as a way to remind voters that the Clinton years were not just “peace and prosperity,” as Mrs. Clinton often characterized her husband’s presidency during her 2008 presidential campaign.

Mr. Clinton is not the only president who weathered harsh attacks. Harry Reid, the Senator majority leader, called former President George W. Bush a “liar” and a “loser,” and protesters depicted him as Hitler.

“Every president probably thinks he had it worse than all his predecessors,” said Kenneth L. Khachigian, a Republican strategist who served as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. “But,” he added, “those of us in the Nixon years would have gladly traded places with Bill Clinton’s White House.”

2/12/1995   The New York Times   By James Atlas

10/20/2014   New York Magazine   By Joe Coscarelli

“My name is Monica Lewinsky, though I have often been advised to change it or been asked why on earth I haven’t,” the former White House intern told the Forbes “30 Under 30” summit in Philadelphia today. “I am still Monica Lewinsky.”

Building off of her essay in Vanity Fair this summer, Lewinsky has relaunched her public persona — she’s on Twitter now, too — as an advocate against online harassment. “Overnight I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one. I was Patient Zero,” she said. “The first person to have their reputation completely destroyed, worldwide, via the internet.”

“It is only my fourth time delivering a speech in public,” she began. “So if I seem nervous, forgive me, because I am. And a little emotional, too.”

“I fell in love with my boss, in a 22-year-old sort of way,” she went on. “It happens. But my boss was the President of the United States.” Lewinsky, through some tears, then detailed the sexist campaign of what’s now dubbed cyberbullying she faced in the wake of the Clinton affair. Her mantra throughout, she said, was “I want to die.”

2/13/2004   People For the American Way

Is retired federal judge Laurence Silberman the right person to co-chair the Iraq intelligence commission? Those who know him—including onetime Nixon aide and respected author Kevin Phillips, former independent counsel and Eisenhower deputy attorney general Lawrence Walsh, and reformed right-wing hit man David Brock—raise serious concerns about Silberman’s past activities, his temperament, his judgement and his unyielding commitment to right-wing orthodoxy. After reviewing this criticism, along with Silberman’s own statements, it becomes clear that Silberman is ill suited for a role on the intelligence commission.

“October Surprise”
Both Phillips and Walsh allege that Silberman was involved in the Reagan campaign’s purported efforts to delay the release of American hostages in Iran until after the 1980 presidential elections.

In a commentary on National Public Radio, Phillips notes:

“Silberman has been more involved with cover-ups in the Middle East than with any attempts to unravel them [including] the October surprise episode in 1980 in which the Republicans were later accused of colluding with the revolutionary government of Iran to keep 52 American hostages confined in Iran so that they could not be freed by the Jimmy Carter administration in time to influence the 1980 presidential election….[I]n 1980 as part of that year’s Republican campaign, he attended at least one of the October surprise meetings where an Iranian representative discussed what Iran would want in exchange for keeping the hostages.”

Walsh’s book, Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up, provides a similar account:

“…Silberman had been on the fringe of the negotiations to avoid the possibility of an ‘October surprise’–the pre-election release of the U.S. embassy staff held captive by Iranian radicals. He and Robert McFarlane had represented Reagan in at least one meeting with a person who claimed to have influence with Iranians who might affect the timing of the release of the hostages. Among some career officers in the State Department, he was jokingly referred to as ‘our ambassador to Khomeini.’”

Equal Justice?
Silberman’s strikingly different views on independent counsel investigations of the executive branch suggest that Silberman has two standards of justice: one for his friends and ideological soul mates and another for those perceived as his enemies.

In 1987, while independent counsel Alexia Morrison investigated the Reagan administration, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the independent counsel statute was unconstitutional. According to Silberman, a Reagan appointee, who penned the decision:

“[The office of independent counsel] so deeply invades the president’s executive prerogatives and responsibilities [for law enforcement] and so jeopardizes individual liberty as to be unconstitutional…. A statute that vests the appointment of an officer who prosecutes the criminal law in some branch other than the executive…obstructs the president’s ability to execute the law. [And creating a prosecutor free of the usual restraints] has troubling consequences for those who find themselves the target of the independent counsel.”

In a 7-1 decision, the Supreme Court reversed the ruling written by Silberman, holding that the independent counsel law was constitutional, with only Justice Scalia dissenting.

However, in 1998, when independent counsel Kenneth Starr investigated the Clinton administration, Silberman’s take on the independent counsel was decidedly different. Gone were worries about “the president’s ability to execute the law.” Instead, in a case concerning whether Secret Service agents could be forced to testify about private conversations involving the President, Silberman went further than any of his colleagues in arguing for deference to the independent counsel. In the ruling, the court of appeals rejected the arguments of the Treasury and Justice departments that a “protective function privilege” should be recognized with respect to Secret Service agents who guard the President. Silberman not only agreed with that ruling, but also argued that “no one” in the federal government, including the Treasury and Justice departments, should be permitted even to appear in court and disagree with the independent counsel on the issue. Although Silberman claimed that this result was compelled by the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the independent counsel law, not a single one of his colleagues agreed with his opinion. Silberman went even further, claiming that “the President’s agents literally and figuratively ‘declare[d] war’ on the Independent Counsel”. Noting that the independent counsel “represents the United States,” Silberman went on to ask, “Can it be said that the President of the United States has declared war on the United States?”

Silberman and Oliver North
Walsh, the independent counsel who investigated the Reagan administration’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, found that his staff could not get a fair hearing from Silberman. According to Walsh, when the counsel’s office tried to make the case against Iran-Contra conspirator Lt. Col. Oliver North in one argument, Silberman cut them off at every turn:

“Silberman’s bias had been so intrusive that it had almost prevented [Gerard Lynch, who represented the independent counsel’s office] from presenting a coherent argument…. [R]arely had [Lynch] reached the fourth sentence in any answer before Silberman interrupted him–not seeking clarification but simply badgering him to make some concession. At times, the judge’s sole purpose seemed to have been diversion and obstruction….[Silberman’s interrogation] had been an overbearing effort to coerce a concession if not just to block a fair statement of our position. His performance had been ugly.”

Walsh even considered reporting Silberman for judicial misconduct. Ultimately, North’s conviction was overturned by the court on procedural grounds in a 2-1 decision, with Silberman in the majority.

A Question of Temperament
Walsh notes Silberman’s badgering, ugly, obstructionist performance during Oliver North’s appeal. His sarcastic display was hardly an isolated instance. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who once served with Silberman on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, reportedly referred to some of the judge’s opinions as “disrespectful.” During a particularly animated debate, Silberman warned another of his colleagues, Judge Abner Mikva, “If you were 10 years younger, I’d be tempted to punch you in the nose.”

Of particular concern is Silberman’s treatment of yet another colleague from the D.C Circuit, Judge Patricia Wald. According to David Brock—former right-wing hit man and columnist for the American Spectator—Silberman “hated [Wald] with a passion.” In The Real Anita Hill, Brock portrayed Judge Wald as a conspirator in the campaign against Clarence Thomas, a frivolous allegation. In Blinded by the Right, Brock’s 2002 mea-culpa memoir, he indicates that “it had been none other than Judge Silberman who gave me the false information on his colleague Pat Wald.” As it turns out, President Bush has nominated both Silberman and Wald for the intelligence commission. How can Wald and her colleagues on the commission expect fair and respectful treatment from Silberman given his record?

David Brock’s Surrogate Father
During the early years of the Clinton administration, Brock wrote stories—which he now disavows—accusing Anita Hill of lying in her testimony against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Brock also wrote smear pieces concerning rumors of President Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual improprieties, including the now infamous “Troopergate” scandal. According to Brock, who has since cut his ties with the Right, Silberman and his wife Ricky were his “surrogate parents” during this period and played “an absolutely key role” in what he wrote.

In Blinded by the Right, Brock notes that the Silbermans provided grist for the Anita Hill rumor mill even as he was serving as a judge on the Court of Appeals:

“If Republican aides were eager to abet my savaging [Anita] Hill, so were Thomas’s closest friends [including] D.C. Circuit Court Judge Laurence Silberman [and] his wife, Ricky…. [Judge] Silberman speculated that Hill was a lesbian, ‘acting out.’ Besides, Silberman confided, Thomas would have never asked Hill for a date: Did I know she had bad breath?”

Such groundless speculation eventually served as part of backbone for Brock’s 1993 book, The Real Anita Hill.

Brock also indicates Ricky Silberman viewed investigations of the Clintons as payback for the Clarence Thomas hearings:

“[I]t was actually Ricky Silberman’s idea to approach Ken Starr to file that friend-of-the-court brief in the Paula Jones case. And Ricky knew the Jones case was simply payback for the Anita Hill affair. She thought, wouldn’t it be delicious that Clinton would now be accused of sexual improprieties in the same way that Clarence Thomas had been?”

And, according to Brock, Silberman pressed him to write a controversial piece on Troopergate:

“Though he was a sitting judge who would rule on matters to which the Clinton administration was a party, Larry [Silberman] strongly urged me to go forward…. The trooper story would be much bigger than the Anita Hill book, he predicted. Clinton would be ‘devastated’…. [T]he judge told me he felt sure that if the same story had been written about Ronald Reagan, it would have toppled him from office. Clinton, he surmised, might be toppled as well.”

Refusing Recusal
Why didn’t Silberman recuse himself in 1998 when he was part of a three-judge panel settling disputes between Ken Starr and the Clinton administration? After all, he was a friend of Starr’s and had served with him on the D.C. Circuit Court. Meanwhile, his wife, Ricky, hired Starr to write an amicus brief for her organization in the Paula Jones suit against Clinton. And, as Brock notes, Silberman frequently crossed the line from impartial jurist to unabashed partisan as he devised strategies to attack Hill and Clinton: “Larry would often preface his advice to me with the wry demurrer that judges shouldn’t get involved in politics—‘That would be improper,’ he’d say—and then forge ahead anyway.” Such involvement in political activities would be in violation of judicial ethics.

Incredibly, in spite of his intense political involvement, Silberman has sharply criticized other judges for much less political activities. For example, in 1991, he responded with indignation to a piece by federal Appeals Court Judge Jon Newman of Boston, which urged President George H.W. Bush to withdraw the Clarence Thomas nomination. Silberman said, “I do not see how it could possibly be suggested that Judge Newman’s dramatic entry into the intense political controversy was appropriate conduct for a federal judge.” In another instance, after Judge A. Leon Higginbottham Jr. wrote an open letter to the newly-confirmed Justice Thomas, Silberman said:

“The letter’s patronizing tone, telling a new justice how to vote, was surely in shockingly bad taste, but its political cast – it could have served nicely as an election campaign speech – breached any conceivable standard of judicial ethics.”

Not that this has prevented Silberman from criticizing the Supreme Court when it suits him. In a November 2002 speech, Silberman, by this point a senior judge on the Court of Appeals, sharply criticized Supreme Court decisions on abortion, religion, and gay rights, declaring,

“I do not think it even can be seriously argued that any of these lines of decision had a shadow of true constitutional justification…. How does the court get away with it? It maintains its legitimacy so long as its activist opinions coincide with the views of a broad national consensus of elite opinion.”

Clearly Silberman understands judicial ethics. However, he apparently doesn’t believe that they apply to him.

Federalist Society Connection
For additional insights into Silberman’s political philosophy, one need look no further than his involvement with the Federalist Society, the right-wing group that screens President Bush’s judicial nominees. Silberman is a member and a frequent guest speaker at Society events. At an April 2002 event, Silberman advised Bush judicial nominees to avoid questions posed to them regarding their ideology or controversial issues. In fact, he took credit for stealthily guiding Justice Scalia through the confirmation process by avoiding such issues. Can a man who urges secrecy to protect his ideological compatriots be expected to uncover secrets as co-chair of the intelligence commission?

Wrong Man for the Job
His hyper-partisan activities, belligerent temperament and questionable ethics make Laurence Silberman the wrong choice to help lead the U.S. intelligence commission. Given that the American people are relying on the commission to answer troubling questions about issues as large as war and peace, President Bush should replace Silberman with someone worthy of the nation’s trust.

By KATIE GLUECK | 10/16/14 | Politico

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — As a federal prosecutor in the 1980s, Asa Hutchinson sent Bill Clinton’s brother to jail. As a member of Congress in the late 1990s, Hutchinson steered impeachment proceedings against the president from his home state.

But to hear him tell it now, Hutchinson — likely the next governor of this state — has the utmost respect for Hillary Clinton, and he’s downright fond of Bill.

That posture is a testament to the enduring power of the Clinton name here. But it’s also driven by the complicated relationship Hutchinson has had with Clinton dating back to the 1970s, long before they faced off over Monicagate or became household names in Arkansas politics.

Now the favorite to defeat Democratic candidate Mike Ross in the governor’s race, Hutchinson has the potential to be a serious thorn in both Clintons’ sides if Hillary Clinton runs for president as expected. But in a 40-minute interview here, the 63-year-old Hutchinson showed little interest in becoming a surrogate for Clinton antagonists.

If their opposing political parties make them adversaries by default, Hutchinson made clear he harbors no grudge against the Clintons — even if the former first couple’s allies hold one against him.

“I ran in 1996 for Congress, and [Bill Clinton] came in and campaigned, of course, for my Democratic opponent,” Hutchinson recalled with a smile. “He’s always been on the other side from a political standpoint,” adding that Clinton’s fervor for politics, even as he nears age 70, is “something that’s perhaps even refreshing to see.”

To say Clinton has “always been on the other side” may be an understatement. In Congress, Hutchinson, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, chose to serve as one of the House managers handling Clinton’s impeachment — something many Democrats here have never gotten over.

About 10 years after the impeachment, Hutchinson told The Associated Press that he initially wasn’t interested in joining the proceedings, though many of his colleagues on Judiciary were spearheading the effort. And though reports from the time indicate that Hutchinson wasn’t as excited about the impeachment drive as some of his fellow Republicans, he opted to play a central role in it just the same.

“I’m grateful for this opportunity, although it … comes with deep regret to be before you,” Hutchinson told senators in the opening remarks of his impeachment presentation in 1999. But then he proceeded to dive in, outlining the “seven pillars of obstruction” Clinton allegedly perpetrated.

“I knew it wasn’t good politics for Arkansas, being the president’s home state,” he said a decade later, reflecting on the impeachment experience in the AP interview. But he concluded that “I could actually help our country go through a difficult time, and so I accepted that responsibility reluctantly.”

“Anybody who observed me at that time knows I was just trying to help the country through a difficult time,” Hutchinson added during the interview with POLITICO last week.

To which many Arkansas Democrats respond: Please. They were outraged then and say they haven’t forgotten that Hutchinson chose to help prosecute the president who put their state on the map.

“There’s no love lost, that’s for sure,” said Little Rock’s Democratic Mayor Mark Stodola, a longtime Clinton supporter. “There’s a substantial number of people who believe Asa did not have to go do that extra step by being part of the impeachment team, that the piling on was gratuitous coming from Arkansas.”

A spokesman for Bill Clinton did not return a request for comment on the former president’s relationship with Hutchinson.

Hutchinson was courteous, if somewhat reserved, during the interview last week, joining a reporter in a dark-paneled conference room in a building that houses his campaign headquarters after walking his grown daughter — whose child stars in one of Hutchinson’s best-received ads — to the door. The former congressman, who is 6 feet 1 inch, sat tall, with his thinning, nearly white hair neatly combed back, and invited the interviewer to “ask me anything you’d like.” There was no fire-breathing rhetoric: Hutchinson, trained as a lawyer, talked about Arkansas and his opponent in a cool, analytical tone. And when he didn’t want to discuss a subject — like Hillary Clinton — he declined to answer questions witha broad smile.

Hutchinson’s brother, Tim Hutchinson, lost his Senate seat in 2002 to Arkansas Attorney General Mark Pryor, as Democrats called Tim Hutchinson a hypocrite for vocally backing impeachment even as he divorced the mother of his children to marry a much younger staffer. Now Pryor is locked in one of the closest Senate races of the year against GOP Rep. Tom Cotton.

Asa Hutchinson, who represented a conservative district in an otherwise Democratic-tilted state, escaped the impeachment politically unscathed (though there were rumblings of anger from some constituents at the time).

Skip Rutherford, the dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas and a longtime friend of the former president, said he doesn’t think people “wake up in the middle of the night and pace the floor over it. But do they recall it? Yeah. I recall it.”

Ross, Hutchinson’s opponent, has brought up impeachment on occasion, though in an interview with POLITICO, Ross said his campaign is “not about reliving the past.” Clinton campaigned for the Democratic ticket in Arkansas last week and will do so again over the weekend.

Hutchinson and Bill Clinton first encountered each other at the University of Arkansas Law School in the 1970s, when Hutchinson was a student and Clinton, fresh out of Yale Law School, was teaching (though he was not Hutchinson’s professor). Hutchinson’s politics hadn’t yet jelled: He recalled going door-to-door for David Pryor, the former Democratic senator and governor of Arkansas, who is the father of Mark Pryor.

As it turned out, that was the last time Hutchinson campaigned for a Democrat, he said, but his interactions with Clinton continued.

“Our paths crossed [again] when I was U.S. attorney and he was governor at that time,” Hutchinson said of Bill Clinton in the interview. I remember him calling my home [about] this terrorist group up in northern Arkansas. We worked together [on a stand-down].”

In the 1980s, Hutchinson, then a Reagan-appointed U.S. attorney, “had the unfortunate responsibility” of prosecuting Clinton’s half-brother, Roger, who eventually went to jail on drug charges. But in the former president’s memoirs, published after he left office, Clinton wrote that the jail time probably saved Roger Clinton’s life — and he had praise for Hutchinson’s conduct.

“Asa Hutchinson was professional, fair and sensitive to the agony my family was experiencing,” Clinton wrote. “I wasn’t at all surprised when later he was elected to Congress from the Third District.”

Hutchinson was for a long time one of a handful of Republican voices in a Southern state with a strong Democratic tradition. As Clinton climbed the ranks, Hutchinson lost three statewide races.

“Whether it’s Dale Bumpers” — the beloved former senator, to whom Hutchinson lost in 1986, and who delivered the final speech on behalf of Clinton in the impeachment proceedings — “or Bill Clinton, they’ve had a very strong farm team, and populist-type candidates on the Democratic side,” Hutchinson said.

In the early 1990s, Hutchinson served as state GOP chairman while Clinton was governor.

“So we’ve always been very respectful adversaries, respectful political adversaries,” he said. “That’s how I viewed that relationship.”

In 1996, Hutchinson won his first House race. His opponent was Ann Henry, a personal friend of the Clintons who hosted the couple’s wedding reception at her home; her top campaign strategist was also Clinton’s former chief of staff, according to a report from the time.

From the House, Hutchinson was appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. His nomination sailed through the Senate on a 98-1 vote, with Hillary Clinton, then a senator, voting yes.

She “did me the great honor of supporting my confirmation,” Hutchinson said. And after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the two had “very professional” interactions when he served as undersecretary in the Department of Homeland Security and she was in the Senate.

Hutchinson declined repeatedly to assess a potential Hillary Clinton 2016 candidacy or to say whether he’d be a surrogate for the eventual GOP nominee. He skirted questions about his party’s criticism of her on issues like the Benghazi attacks. “This race is about Arkansas, not about what happens three years from now, it’s about what happens next year,” Hutchinson said.

“I think they’ve looked at me as somebody who’s very committed to our country,” he later said of the Clintons. “We have different viewpoints, I respect them the same ways. And so I would just urge anybody who’s worried about the past to take the same fair approach and look at my heart.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/asa-hutchinson-2014-arkansas-election-111922_Page2.html

09/24/2014   THR   by Tina Daunt

She likely will announce a second bid after the November midterms as Howard Gordon and Dana Walden begin to rally: “People have been very ‘Let’s wait and see’ until now. People are starting to get excited,” says Gordon

9/19/2014   The Hollywood Reporter   by Tatiana Siegel

Remember when those Mideast-themed films that bombed? Neither do studios as new topical tales court “good” controversy without seeming like “leafy green vegetables”

This story first appeared in the Sept. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

If a story plays for free on CNN, audiences won’t pay to see it in a theater. This was the mind-set behind Hollywood’s aversion to politically minded movies following a string of box-office misfires such as Rendition, In the Valley of Elah, Green Zone and even the Oscar-winning but low-grossing The Hurt Locker.

But these days, political movies are back. Thanks to Kathryn Bigelow‘s Osama bin Laden thriller Zero Dark Thirty ($133 million worldwide), a dozen or so ripped-from-the-headlines films are about to debut or are in the works, even at the risk-averse major studios.

From competing Edward Snowden projects (one from Oliver Stone) to dueling drone warfare dramas to a pair of films about rescued U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl, Hollywood’s slates again are mirroring the day’s most controversial news. Brad Pitt is poised to play disgraced Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who resigned after he made disparaging comments about Barack Obama, in New Regency’s The Operators. And on Sept. 3, Sony said George Clooney will direct an adaptation of Hack Attack, which delves into the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch‘s news empire and the U.K. government. Likewise, on Oct. 10, Focus will release Kill the Messenger from Homeland director Michael Cuesta, which paints an unflattering portrait of the CIA. And Sony’s Kim Jong-un comedy The Interview bows Dec. 25.

At the same time, the Toronto Film Festival showcased an unusually high number of politically heavy films, including Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater, about a journalist jailed in Tehran, and the drone critique Good Kill. And several hot-button projects, such as Truth, about Dan Rather‘s firing from CBS News, and Gavin Hood‘s drone drama Eye in the Sky, were being shopped.

Is the box office ready to support such provocative subjects? Last fall’s Julian Assange film The Fifth Estate flopped with just $8.6 million worldwide. But in the 13 years since 9/11, Americans have become more skeptical of the government’s handling of national security, and the studios are more inclined to back films that question its practices. “9/11 bombarded us with images of the attacks and reports of future attacks, and the status quo was pro-American military might,” says Cuesta. “As a result, the studios backed away from hard-hitting films about the war and national security. Now we’re seeing a willingness to tackle complicated and controversial issues.”

The challenge remains selling these types of films. When marketing based-on-a-true-story plots, executives say the key is enticing audiences without appearing didactic. “You don’t want to market it in a way that feels like some form of leafy green vegetables that you don’t want to eat,” says Gigi Pritzker, who produced Rosewater. “Jon said to me recently, ‘I thought making the movie was the hard part.’ ”

Ron Howard received some of the best reviews of his career and a best picture Oscar nomination for 2008’s Frost/Nixon, a retelling of the post-Watergate interviews between British TV host David Frost and President Nixon. Still, the Universal film mustered only $27 million worldwide. “It’s a challenge to market these stories,” Howard tells THR. “But if you make it for the right price, there’s an audience. And when they work, they resonate.”

Unlike in the 1970s, when political-minded films like All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and 3 Days of the Condor could lure audiences year-round, now insiders say that year-end awards buzz is necessary to selling a political film. “If they come out of the gate and people are attaching the word ‘Oscar’ to them, it makes them more of a must-see,” says Phil Contrino of BoxOffice.com. “But if they fall short of that, people tend to stay home.”

The new crop of political films boasts plenty of Oscar veterans including Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips) attached to an adaptation of Agent Storm: My Life Inside al Qaeda and the CIA for Sony as well as another Assange film, The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, for Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna Pictures. Oscar-winning writer Mark Boal (Hurt Locker) and nominee Todd Field (In the Bedroom) are developing respective projects about Bergdahl, the Army soldier who was captured by the Taliban and traded for five terrorist suspects. Sony is looking for a top writer to tackle Glenn Greenwald‘s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

The biggest problem — that a film will be dismissed as partisan — also can be its greatest blessing at a time when movies clamor for buzz. With Zero, Bigelow was slammed by the left (for glorifying torture) and the right (for her access to classified documents). The uproar put the Sony movie in the national conversation. Clooney, an outspoken liberal, likely will be attacked when his hacking film premieres. And for Sony, that’s part of the appeal.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/whats-behind-hollywoods-renewed-interest-733050

7/1/1997   Esquire

by David Brock

He pilloried Anita Hill, and all the conservatives cheered. When he made Troopergate a household word, he was ordained as the one who would bring down the Clintons. Then the author discovered the truth about his so-called friends. I kill liberals for a living. Or at least I used to.

On the day last fall that my book on Hillary Rodham Clinton came out, I retrieved a voice-mail message from a friend, Barbara Olson, a Republican lawyer who was working on Capitol Hill, investigating the firing of the White House Travel Office workers. A few months before, under a white tent in the leafy Republican suburb of Great Falls, Virginia, I had been a guest at the wedding of Barbara and Ted Olson, the Washington superlawyer who counts President Reagan and The American Spectator, the magazine where I work, among his clients. On hand was the entire anti-Clinton establishment, everyone from Wall Street Journal editorial-page editor Robert Bartley to Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

That Friday night, I was planning to go to another party at the Olsons’ to celebrate the end of the first session of Congress under Republican control in more than four decades. The cohost that evening was Ginni Thomas, a top aide to House Republican leader Dick Armey and the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, whom I had vigorously defended against Anita Hill’s sexual-harassment charges in my first book, The Real Anita Hill. That book, and my subsequent reporting of the Troopergate scandal, involving Bill Clinton’s use of Arkansas state troopers to procure women, was the source of my reputation as (pick one): “the Right’s chief hatchet man” (GQ); “that foul little right-wing reporter” (Molly Ivins); “one of the best investigative reporters in the country” (Bob Novak); “not only a sleazebag but the occasion in others for sleazebaggery” (Gerry Wills); “David Crock” (The New Republic); or “the Bob Woodward of the Right” (The Washington Post).

My being invited to the Olson event was fitting; I had drawn the same crowd of Republican lawyers, Capitol Hill aides, and conservative writers to two huge bashes celebrating the Gingrich Congress at my house in Georgetown, one on election night 1994 and another on the one-hundredth day of the Contract with America. My Hillary book was about to hit the stores, and it would be the subject of intense interest among the assembled conservatives. At Barbara and Ted’s wedding, former Bush White House counsel C. Boyden Gray joked that since it looked as if Kenneth Starr was not going to come up with the goods before the election, it was up to me to derail the Clinton juggernaut. A report in Newsweek that George Stephanopoulos was holding White House meetings on how to respond to the book only heightened expectations.

But in Barbara’s message, I discovered that as word filtered out that The Seduction of Hillary Rodham not only failed to deliver the deathblow to the Clintons that everyone had expected but was in some respects sympathetic to its subject, I was suddenly no longer welcome in my old circle. “Given what’s happened, I don’t think you’d be comfortable at the party,” she said. As only someone who has fallen from grace in Washington can know, it was a classic moment.

Barbara’s message was especially jarring, given that Ted Olson, a member of The American Spectator’s board of directors, had a thriving First Amendment practice. Despite Ted’s conservative politics, he had defended New York Newsday reporter Timothy Phelps, who broke the Anita Hill story, when Phelps was investigated by the Senate Judiciary Committee about leaked material that he had printed. Of all people, I thought surely Ted understood that my commitment to journalism outweighed partisan considerations. I would soon see that I was wrong not only about this but also about many of my conservative friends, about the character of the movement that had celebrated my work, and about how much room there is in conservative politics for honest journalism.

After playing Barbara’s message a second time, and then a third, I had a sense of deja vu. Back in 1983, at the University of California at Berkeley, where I was then a junior, I had been elected university editor of The Daily Californian, the main campus paper. My first signed op-ed column was an endorsement of the U.S. invasion of Grenada–not a terribly controversial position in the nation as a whole, but at Berkeley, where protesters were burning the flag, this was an act of heresy. Though I had gone to Berkeley because of its reputation for liberal activism rooted in the campus free-speech movement, the liberals turned out to be not so liberal after all. There was a campaign to recall me from the editorship, and I was shunned for the balance of my time on campus. This experience of having to fight to express my opinions–at Berkeley, of all places–marked my break with liberalism. I began to see an incipient conservatism as challenging a tired, lockstep liberal orthodoxy, and, like many of my generation, I moved further to the right in the 1980s.

But in publishing a biography of Hillary Clinton that went against the conservative grain, I felt I had come full circle. In concluding that Hillary was not the corrupt, power-mad shrew of conservative demonology (a caricature that any reasonably competent biographer would have rejected), I ran up against the same intellectual intolerance and smug groupthink that had sent me on a conservative trajectory more than a decade before. Looking at my friends, I now saw the other side.

The age of reporting is dead. In the era of television punditry, all you have to do is pronounce. Substance takes a backseat to spin, and there is no place for someone who steps out of bounds. Perhaps as a writer of political books, I should have expected as much. But at thirty-four, I found I still had a lot to learn about what’s really behind things in Washington, where the crucial distinction between political and journalistic or intellectual standards isn’t recognized.

“In Washington, we think that the `news’ on the front page of The Washington Post is what Kay Graham wants us to believe, and we expect the same thing of the [conservative] Washington limes,” David Boaz of the Cato Institute offered by way of a postmortem. “People who hate the Clintons are supposed to write books about how evil they are. If you don’t find any evil, you’re not supposed to say you found no evil. You just shouldn’t write the book.”

That a self-professed conservative and the lead investigative writer for the aggressively anti-Clinton American Spectator wrote the book anyway confused just about everyone. Both liberals and conservatives–and the political press in the middle–were wedded not only to their images of Hillary but also to an image of me as a right-wing hit man. With the exception of journalist James B. Stewart, who wrote in The New York Times, “In substance and style … [Brock] has tried to do his subject justice in the broadest sense,” everyone had a story written before the book came out, and once it did, no one seemed able to accommodate a different reality. When an advance copy of the book went to Newsweek, the sound of air going out of the balloon was almost audible. “The editors are in tears that you don’t have Hillary in bed with Vince [Foster], or at least someone,” I was told.

For a while, I confess, I was confused, too. I first gained notice in the spring of 1993 with The Real Anita Hill, a fierce assault on the credibility of Clarence Thomas’s accuser and on the liberal special interests, feminist groups, and media that sponsored her. At a time when the conservatives had been consigned to oblivion by Bill Clinton’s election, and a Democratic agenda, in the form of Hillary’s health-care plan, was on the march for the first time since LBJ’s Great Society, the book raised a flag all conservatives could rally around and became a best-seller.

Eight months later, during Christmas week, I launched the print equivalent of poison-gas canisters on the Clinton White House with the Troopergate story. Perhaps the most humiliating portrait of a sitting president and his wife ever published, the piece detailed graphically Clinton’s history of extramarital affairs and exposed the culture of petty corruption, deceit, and cover-up that this behavior engendered.

Suddenly, media interest in the muck of Arkansas scandal was reignited, and the conservative attack machine was hitting on all cylinders. Within two months Paula Jones (identified in my piece simply as “Paula”) had stepped forward to make her unprecedented sexual-harassment claim against Clinton, and an independent counsel had been appointed to investigate the Whitewater affair. After Iran-Contra, the defeat of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, and the bloodying of Clarence Thomas–the defining political moments for my cohort in Washington–I viewed Troopergate not only as a good story but as an eye for an eye. When Harvard University’s Neiman Reports critiqued the piece and dubbed me “the Right’s Road Warrior,” I was never prouder.

Especially for younger conservatives like me, it was easy to get caught up in the heady zeal of Clinton bashing and the smashing GOP victory that followed. Three months after the Republican takeover of Congress, I sold a proposal for a book on the most tempting target I could think of, Hillary Clinton, to Simon & Schuster’s Free Press division, which had published my first book. The only question a top executive at the company asked me m our presigning meeting was whether I thought Hillary was a lesbian. I got paid 51 million. My frank intention was to butcher my prey.

Then a funny thing happened. For the first time in my experience, my partisan prejudices were substantially dispelled, rather than reinforced by the fruits of my investigation. Though I had criticized Republicans like James Baker and Jerry Falwell in print, I had always been able to satisfy my journalistic standards while: generally serving the conservative cause. Now the two were in conflict. To the extent that I was programmed to believe the worst of Hillary, the far more nuanced picture I was piecing together knocked me off my foundations.

Facing the enormous expectations of both my conservative audience and my own press notices, I questioned whether to push on into uncharted waters or to abandon ship. With my publisher’s blessing, I was faithful to my reporting. If the image of Hillary as a greedy influence peddler was confounded by the evidence–she made about twenty dollars a month on the controversial representation of her Whitewater partner Jim McDougal–that’s what I would write. If the paper trail substantiated Hillary’s much-doubted claim that she had little involvement in sham deals at the Castle Grande trailer-park development, a conclusion McDougal has subsequently verified, so be it. (There was no dirt down the lesbian trail, either.)

Led by a front-page article headlined SAINTHOOD FROM A HILLARY CRITIC in The Washington Times, where I had worked as a reporter and editor for several years, the conservative press panned the book as a whitewash and questioned my motives for writing it. National Review charged: “Brock hates being trapped in the role of a partisan conservative journalist, and this book is his misbegotten attempt at escape.”

On C-SPAN, New Right leader Paul Weyrich, whose National Empowerment Television had pushed the Anita Hill book and the Troopergate story, brushed off questions by saying he didn’t trust my work. Talk-radio hosts like Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy–who also had vigorously promoted my earlier writing–wouldn’t book me on their shows. Bay Buchanan, Pat Buchanan’s sister and the cohost of CNBC’s Equal Time, confided that if only I had taken “the right perspective” on Hillary, the conservatives would have helped me sell the book. (At least Bay was honest!)

Yet the criticism that I was “soft” on Hillary was false. On the contrary, the book accepted and expanded on the predominant conservative view of Hillary as a committed leftist, ardent feminist, and hard-nosed operator willing to compromise her ideals, cut ethical corners, and defend a flawed marriage for power. But for the conservatives, this wasn’t enough. They wanted red meat, not a serious biography. As Weekly Standard reviewer and noted neoconservative intellectual Midge Decter lamented, “Perhaps one day … David Brock will return to his proper calling, the unearthing of dark secrets.”

Though it may be difficult for those outside my circle to fathom, most conservatives have come to so revile Hillary Clinton and everything she represents that they have lost their moorings, forgetting that they had opposed Hillary in the first place on political grounds, not out of personal loathing, which really transcends politics. On this score, I had myself partly to blame: Those expecting Hillary in witch’s garb–as she famously appeared on the cover of the Spectator in an illustration for one of my articles–were bound to feel let down.

I’d run up against this mind-set before. When The Real Anita Hill was published in 1993, television networks imposed a virtual blackout. Bookstores posted a Molly Ivins column–titled “Save Yourself $24.95”–beside displays. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who called the book “sleaze with footnotes,” conceded in private correspondence that he had only “breezed hastily” through it before trashing it. And writing in The Nation, Deirdre English changed the subject to “the Real David Brock,” whose work, she said, couldn’t be trusted because it was underwritten by right-wing foundations.

Following Troopergate, New York Times columnist Frank Rich described me as “prim” and charged that my journalism was motivated by an “animus” toward women. Whatever Rich’s intent, the column put my homosexuality in the gossip mill, and I soon acknowledged in The Washington Post that I was gay.

Still, attacks from the other side are just part of the Washington game. When fellow conservatives maligned my book, impugned my motives, and engaged in the personal sniping and pettiness of movement politics, I was deeply disturbed and felt hurt.

Conservative activist Grover

Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and a key ally of Speaker Newt Gingrich, represents a powerful feature of conservatism, one that I had woefully underestimated: the premium on loyalty. More than any other conservative I know, Norquist has taken it upon himself to fight a rearguard action against dissent in the ranks. Every Wednesday morning, the fifty leading conservative activists in Washington, many of them close associates of mine through the years, gather in Norquist’s Dupont Circle offices to plot strategy. At a recent meeting, I was nominated in absentia for the Kevin Phillips Award, so named for a Republican who makes a living “helping the other team.”

I’d already had cause to be disillusioned with my conservative allies three months before The Seduction of Hillary Rodham even hit. The controversy last July over the book Unlimited Access, by FBI-agent-turned-author Gary Aldrich, was a powerful signal, placing in question the integrity of my friends and the value of the reputation I enjoyed among them.

In his best-selling expose on the Clinton White House, Aldrich reported as fact a wild rumor about Bill Clinton sneaking out of the White House to a Marriott hotel to meet women for trysts. Because Aldrich had been assigned to the White House during the first two years of the Clinton presidency, I had asked him about this piece of gossip, which I’d heard while I was digging for damaging material for my own book. He told me then that he knew nothing about the rumor. So when this “revelation” made sensational front-page headlines, Aldrich was grilled by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff and let on that his source was a journalist. Since the clique of reporters following the Clinton scandals is small, it was no surprise when Isikoff immediately called me and asked what I knew. I responded viscerally, not realizing that by telling the truth I would cause some conservatives to conclude that they had a traitor in their midst. Just to be sure, I called Aldrich, who verified that I, in fact, was the sole source for his supposed scoop

My public comments, other glaring holes in the hook, and Aldrich’s loopy tales of X-rated ornaments on the White House Christmas tree led the mainstream press to deep-six Unlimited Access. But as someone who tries hard to practice credible journalism from a conservative perspective, I was outraged when conservative outlets like The Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and talk radio–not to mention right-wing publisher Regnery, which brought out the book–let Aldrich brazen it out and perpetrated a hoax on the public by celebrating Unlimited Access as legitimate and well researched. At The Washington Times, editors went so far as to delete from their own reporter’s story references to my statements challenging the Marriott tale.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the most influential conservative voice in the country, also made a grotesque error in judgment and then compounded it by refusing to admit to the error Editorial-page writer John Fund rushed an excerpt of Unlimited Access to print, and when the hook’s credibility began to crumble, Fund became Aldrich’s point man When he and I were scheduled to appear on CNN’s Larry King Live, he telephoned me at home and asked if we could coordinate our stones before the broadcast, an overture I rebuffed When Fund was asked on the Charlie Rose Show about the evidence for Aldrich’s “allegation” that former Democratic congressman Tony Coelho had used quaaludes, he referred to an article from The Washington Post that mentioned the daily doses of phenobarbital Coelho took for his epilepsy For the first time ever, I found myself rooting for Fund’s sparring partner, Clinton spin doctor James Carville. This was, as Carville said, stuff from the “scum bucket.”

Fund had good reason to sweat. I later learned that on the day before the excerpt was scheduled to run in the Journal, Fund was told directly by one of Aldrich’s sources that it contained factual errors (unrelated to the Marriott problem which had yet to surface) Rather than hold the piece and further investigate Aldrich’s credibility, Fund excised the material he knew to be false and let the balance of the article go out to two million readers. A few months later, as the November election approached, Fund saw to it that the Journal ran a column by Aldrich, accompanied by the likeness of a campaign button that read, I BELIEVE GARY ALDRICH.

Was this the sort of conduct Beltway conservatives expected from their journalists? Apparently it was. Almost as soon as I had spoken with Aldrich, I received the first of several tense phone calls that weekend, warning me to keep my mouth shut The president of the Landmark Legal Foundation and former chief of staff to Attorney General Edwin Meese, Mark Levin, my friend as well as Aldrich’s, told me flatly “If he goes down, we all go down” Levin said that I should have stonewalled Isikoff and told me to leave town to avoid the press I was floored.

For the first time since I’d come out in 1994, I learned that my sexual orientation was being used by some conservatives to discredit me When I made the decision to come out, I made a leap of faith that my conservative friends were not the bigots portrayed by literal typecasters. It was to be quite a test There are a handful of openly gay moderate Republicans, but the homosexuals working in high-level posts at the Republican National Committee, for conservative members of Congress, or in conservative lobbies and think tanks belong to a secret society I was a minority of one as the only openly gay person identified with the conservative movement and inhabiting such hard-line precincts as The American Spectator

For more than two years, I had suffered no repercussions. In the Aldrich affair, however, my conservatives flunked the test. As long as I was on the team, my anti-Clinton credentials apparently checked any latent bigotry about my personal life, but it came rushing to the fore as soon as I broke ranks Trying to undermine my criticism, Aldrich’s PR people put out the word among conservatives that my real problem was not the book’s truthfulness but Aldrich’s antigay rhetoric. Soon enough, a leading conservative columnist called, seeking a response to the humiliating suggestion that “the gay thing” had turned me against Aldrich. At the time, I hadn’t even known of Aldrich’s claim that Hillary had adopted a hiring policy that favored “tough, minority, and lesbian women” and “weak, minority, and gay men.

Of course, my liberal critics were no slouches in this regard, either. Joe Conason, the reflexive Clinton defender at The New York Observer, lampooned my attack on Aldrich as a lovers’ quarrel between two twisted homosexual character assassins of the J. Edgar Hoover school. I had long ago learned to expect nothing but vicious caricature from this crowd, but I did think my own side had accepted me without prejudice Perhaps I had been kidding myself all along. Longtime conservative activist David Keene recently told me that suspicions about me in movement circles did in fact date to my coming out, which was seen as an effort to use my sexual orientation as a point to placate liberal critics. Apparently, I had been viewed as an outsider all along.

Plainly, my allies did not care whether the Aldrich book was true, and they would stop at nothing to salvage it All that mattered to them was inflicting maximum damage on the Clintons in an election year. (As Aldrich himself later claimed in a letter to me: “From what I hear, there is deep, deep disgust and hatred for what you tried to do to me.” And, of course, he was right.) I now had cause to doubt whether my conservative friends, any more than my liberal foes, were interested in anything but gaining partisan advantage. In political combat in Washington, I wondered, were the facts always the first casualty? Had they cheered The Real Anita Hill and Troopergate because they believed them to be true, as I did and do, or just because they were useful?

In March, I was passed over as an invited speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual meeting, which draws political activists from around the nation to the capital to hear the likes of Newt Gingrich, William Bennett, Jack Kemp, Phyllis Schlafly, and Oliver North, and, in the past, me, even as an openly gay man. One friend who attended this year’s CPAC planning sessions told me that when my name was considered for a panel on the Clinton presidency I was denounced as a turncoat. When I found out that my replacement was Gary Aldrich, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry How could they lionize Gary Aldrich the way they had lionized me?

Partisans of all stripes, of course, tend to value reliability over critical thinking. When Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff announced that he was against abortion, colleagues stopped speaking to him, and he was not reelected to the ACLU’s board. ABC’s John Stossel, who began his career as a consumer reporter and is now a critic of government regulation, has been denounced by former allies like Ralph Nader The New Republic has been inundated with complaints from subscribers protesting the tough anti-Clinton line Michael Kelly, the magazine’s new editor, has taken in columns on the Clinton campaign-finance scandals.

Still, there is no “liberal movement” to which these journalists are attached and by which they can be blackballed in the sense that there is a self-identified, hardwired “conservative movement” that can function as a kind of neo-Stalinist thought police that rivals anything I knew at Berkeley

As the beleaguered conservative movement tends to see it, the establishment media–the prestige papers and the television networks–are uniformly opposed to its political views and are waging war on its values. The few conservatives with a platform in the dominant media culture (the “DMC,” in conservative parlance) who break through are obliged to stay loyal to the cause. “There is a circle-the-wagons mentality among conservatives, but it is understandable,” says syndicated columnist Mona Charen, who has upset conservatives in columns critical of both Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. “You have a media in which any sin committed by a Republican is magnified a hundred-fold, and they think we conservative journalists should be bucking up our own side.”

When columnist George Will criticizes conservatives on ABC’s This Week, he can expect to be deluged with calls from irate conservatives, but Cokie Roberts, when criticizing liberals, would hardly elicit the same kind of emotional response from partisan constituents. Newt Gingrich writes personal notes to conservative columnists and magazine editors, denouncing one idea or another as “strategically counterproductive”–as though the journalists were adjuncts of the Republican National Committee. It’s difficult to imagine minority leader Richard Gephardt writing menacing notes to Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift or editors at Harpers.

A deeper problem is the conservative movement’s obsession with the supposed hidden agendas and dark motives of anyone who dissents. It employs an entire lexicon to describe any move from the party line as pandering to the liberal press. When GOP politicians do it, they have “grown in office” or won “strange new respect.” No conservative political figure, not even Ronald Reagan, who was said to have sold out his Soviet policy for the sake of impressing liberal historians, has been immune to this line of attack.

Conservative frustration is understandable to anyone familiar with the dynamics of the American media. While liberals have no obvious career incentives for criticizing Democrats or moving to the right, the same can’t be said for conservatives who criticize their own side or move left. All conservatives know that the surest way to be published on the op-ed page of The New York Times is to attack other conservatives.

Still, the presumption that any deviation from the conservative line is always a calculated career move, rather than a stand on principle, is a weak, unfair, and ultimately self-destructive way of conducting an intellectual or political argument. During the 1996 campaign, conservative grumbling that early critics of Bob Dole such as Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol and syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington were opportunists seeking personal power or media stardom at Dole’s expense led conservatives to dismiss the crucial point they were making–that Dole couldn’t win.

This tendency to close ranks is especially worrisome now, as the era of Republican hegemony and unity has collapsed. As social conservatives and libertarians wage open warfare and the flaws of the leader of the GOP revolution lie exposed, this should be a time for ferment in conservative ranks, not loyalty oaths. But self-criticism and introspection are not the order of the day for people clinging to power.

When National Review’s Kate O’Beime wrote earlier this year that Gingrich should step aside as Speaker to concentrate on clearing himself of pending ethics charges, her own magazine distanced itself from her comments. And when Huffington made the same point, the Wall Street Journal editorial page hissed, “A taste for intellectual exhibitionism gets Arianna Huffington’s name in the news.” The Washington Times, which runs Huffington’s column twice a week, went the Journal one better: The conservative daily spiked several of her columns. When I discussed it with a conservative editor friend, he asked me incredulously: “Why would you expect the conservative press to behave any more honorably than the liberal press?”

That, I guess, is the rub, occasionally, someone plays it straight and reports what he finds. Remember when Bob Woodward discovered that Dan Quayle wasn’t so dumb after all? But too many political journalists seem to have their scripts prepared before they make the first phone call. One wonders how many even believe what they write, so long as it gets them on Crossfire. And when the same person says that Anita Hill lied and that Hillary Clinton is an admirable person, Washington blows a fuse.

As I’ve said, that was not my intention. National Review was dead wrong in concluding that The Seduction of Hillary Rodham was my attempt to escape my reputation as a “partisan conservative journalist.” On the contrary I liked my world, relished that label, and did not wish to be tested in the way I have been. When liberals attacked my credentials as a journalist and stigmatized me as a hired gun for the right wing, I charged ahead because I knew it was baloney. But conservatives appear to have concurred all along with the liberal smear that I wasn’t a “real” journalist–I was bought and paid for, an asset of the conservative movement. Because they had partied at my house, I was expected to parrot their prejudices and cover up their secrets.

Now I do want out. David Brock the Road Warrior of the Right is dead. I’m not comfortable in either partisan camp, and both camps seem uncomfortable with me. My side turned out to be as dirty as theirs.

My conservative views have not changed, and, personally, I’m still at home at The American Spectator Though The Washington Post recently reported that conservative donors have been agitating for my dismissal, any such pressure has been resisted by the editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. Founded as The Alternative in 1967, the magazine “was born wayward and determined to be skeptical,” as Tyrrell put it in his memoir, The Conservative Crack-up. Tyrrell and I have agreed to disagree about Hillary: one bright spot in an otherwise bleak conservative landscape.

A couple of years ago, when the new conservative magazine The Weekly Standard was staffing up, one of the editors told me that all the wide-eyed aspiring conservative journalists who interviewed there wanted to be me. With that in mind, I’ll say to young David Brocks everywhere: I’ve seen aspects of the conservative movement that make me regret having ever associated with it. And I participated in a scandal-fueled war against the Clintons that produced Gary Aldrich; if that is what our conservative case boils down to, we’re doomed. Oh, and don’t be fooled: In a way that is perhaps unique to Washington, your friends are never your friends. Now, go out and make a name for yourself.

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-19532393.html